Metaphor
by chutzpah
Summary: post!Serenity. River makes ripples.


Disclaimer: I don't own Firefly, I'm not making any financial/material profit from this piece of fanfiction, and no infringement is intended. In other words, please don't sue.

_Metaphor_

She was dropping pebbles one by one into a bowl of water when Mal found her, sprawled gracefully across the table, her head pillowed in the crook of her elbow.

"Hey, little one." Mal glanced at her. "Whatcha doin'?"

"Making ripples." She dropped another pebble in and watched the water spreading in perfect concentric rings from the point of impact. "Always making ripples."

Mal nodded slowly, looking over her shoulder at the bowl. The pebbles gleamed a darkish grey underwater, shivering and blurring with each addition to their numbers. "That a fact?"

"No. It's a metaphor."

Mal grinned crookedly. She felt it like a splash of warm sunlight against her skin, good humour and wry, affectionate amusement. "Well, I wouldn't know much about that, darlin'. Haven't had all your fine an' fancy schoolin'."

River gave him a look, her Look, lifting her head. She could see the shadows under his sunlight, the darkness there, like her stones in the water. Mal was a metaphor as well, a metaphorical man for someone so literal, and he was nowhere near as clear as the water rippling cause-and-effect in her bowl.

"So." Mal pulled out a chair, sprawled gracelessly opposite her. "What's up with commandeering our utensils?"

"Utensils is the wrong word." River said quietly. She tilted her head, staring down into the bowl, another pebble cool and smooth between her fingers. "Every time it's still," and she let it go, splish, splash, relinquishing it the way she couldn't relinquish the memories that weighed her down as surely as if they had been stone, "Something happens," and her finger traced the air above the rings, bigger and weaker as they reached the edges of the bowl, "And it changes everything. Changes everyone."

Mal was watching her, patient and silent in a way that Simon couldn't be because Simon loved her too much to be silent when she spoke that way, as if blaming herself. When she dropped each stone it was as if she was saying _ This is me. I change things. Change people. It's my fault. _

Simon couldn't understand the metaphor.

"I'm tired," she said, whispery, windy, sussurating noise in her head, too faint, too familiar, for any one voice to become distinct. "Have to carry everyone else's secrets. Getting to be too full in here, not enough space to think." she closed her hands, fisted them on either side of the bowl, waited for him to understand, for him to _ see _ .

And he did, and his comprehension was a cool, clean wash against her skull, drowning out the whispers, the voices, swirling them away until she didn't have to listen to them anymore, could just hear the weight of his _ knowing _ in the space between her ears.

"Then why don't you stop," said Mal simply, because simple was the way he saw things, the way he made things. "Folk can carry their own secrets, little albatross. Now I know you got a brain the size of a planet an' all, but you can just let them go slidin' on by. No need to hold onto 'em. Might even take it as a kindness if you didn't."

"Not that easy. Bits get stuck."

"I know that. Don't make it not worth fighting for."

River shook her head slightly, dipping the ends of her fingers into the water. It felt good to swirl them slowly around, to make ripples that weren't perfect, that weren't ordered, ripples of her own choice and not the result of a single unstoppable inevitable descent.

"It still leaves traces." she took her hand away from the bowl, rested damp fingers on the table, feeling its stickiness from their last meal. Jayne's fault. Most mess could be attributed to Jayne, directly or indirectly.

Jayne was, thought River, a very large, unsubtle butterfly, creating chaos with every motion.

Another metaphor. She thought in metaphors, spoke in riddles, saw _ truth _ .

Mal didn't comprehend this time. She saw it in his eyes, the question. She was getting confused, taking too long between sentences, distracted by little things- the edge of the chair under her foot, the stones in the bowl, the thoughts (not hers) that spilled like overflow from a brimming teacup.

"If you mix wine with water, it can never be just water again. Some things change, they don't change back, they just keep on changing."

Mal looked at her, looked at her long and hard, with that strange, set, _ thinking _ expression on his face. She knew it before he said it, but she liked to hear it with her ears, "Which one are you?" and it was such an odd question but such a simple one that River smiled for the sheer pleasure of it, the smile that hurt Simon and relieved him at the same time. _ Bittersweet _ .

She understood the question, of course, and the gift that he gave her by asking it.

"Maybe both." she said softly. It was a relief to hear the words, to make the possibility real by speaking it.

"...glad to hear it," Mal said, watching her closely. There was the suggestion of a smile, gentle and unfamiliar, lurking around his mouth. The curve of it held his secrets, the secrets that River kept because they weren't hers to tell.

"Listen," he said, businesslike now, the smile fading everywhere except his eyes. "Things change. People change. Ain't no shame in that and it's nobody's fault. Don't you be regrettin' it."

"Things can't be undone," River murmured, leaning forwards over her bowl, her hair spilling over her shoulder and into the water, the ends of it dark and drifting like seaweed.

River had been to the sea once, before they had broken her down and remade her into what they wanted her to be. She remembered seaweed: rubbery, green, smelly.

The metaphor there was wrong.

Her hair was nothing like seaweed.

Mal leaned over and lifted it out of the bowl, that amused look back on his face. "You're getting your hair wet, darlin'. Can't have you drippin' all over my ship. Folk'd complain."

River gave him a patient look. "Only Jayne."

"Well, yeah, but Jayne's folk..." Mal paused, considering. "Well...supposedly. Anyhow, I don't care for complaints just because you've got it in your head to play at mermaids-"

"Can't be a mermaid," River replied, smiling at him. She touched her drawn-up knees. "No tail."

Mal made a faint sound of amusement, folding his arms. "Ain't you heard of improvisation, little albatross?"

"Make-believe." River said softly, dreamily. She laid her arms over her knees, rested her cheek on the smooth curve of her forearm, eyes rolled up towards him. She liked that look on his face, the warmth that softened his eyes. She thought _ brother _ , although he wasn't hers.

She supposed that was another of his secrets, one of the ones that weighed his shoulders like stones, gave that old pain to the language of his face when the war came up- and it rarely did, because when it did the darkness in Mal's eyes, the steel hard and bright in Zoe's, reminded the rest of the crew that there were parts of them that were better left alone, better left unknown.

(Wash had been fire, River thought, a metaphor fire to temper Zoe's steel.

You could learn a lot through metaphor.)

And River, who could have let Malcolm Reynolds' life pass between her lips, with all his losses and his anger and his love, would not do that. She left things in the past, because between her and Simon, one of them had to.

"I suppose you're a bit above flights of fancy then," Mal said lightly, shifting under her scrutiny. Where Jayne scowled and blustered and told her to bugger off, Mal just tolerated it like an unwanted but expected burden. "Being smart as you are."

"Not a bird either," River said pedantically. She smiled at him, dark eyes twinkling. "Can't fly."

"You're just correctin' me left and right today, hm?"

River made a tiny movement against her arm, the beginnings of a nod. "You're being very wrong today," she explained, but that curve lingered in her mouth. "Imprecise."

"I see." Mal smirked at her. "I'll let the doc and 'nara do all the picking and choosing. I've got actual work to do."

"I'm a distraction."

"I guess you are at that." Mal stood up, stretched. He stretched as if he owned the space he occupied, spine cracking audibly. He shook it off, walked around the table, ruffling River's hair as he passed.

River moved her head without lifting it to watch him leave. He paused just at the door, turned to look at her. There was something like sympathy in his look.

"It's just a bowl of water," he said quietly. "Ain't a metaphor for anything if you don't want it to be."

She stared at him and then nodded slightly, closing her eyes. "Just water." she echoed, listening the whisper of his mind behind that unreadable expression. But she didn't listen closely.

Mal nodded and turned again to go, saying over his shoulder, "And put those stones back where you found 'em. I don't want Inara or somebody comin' up to me later, saying someone's dismantled their Zen garden or what have you. _ Dong ma _ ?"

River smiled faintly, still keeping her eyes closed. "It was Jayne's."

She heard Mal's pause and could imagine the expression on his face, that amused, incredulous expression, warm and bright and brotherly. "Well," he said, "ain't that a thought and one that I didn't need to have."

She listened to his footsteps move away, hollow and echoing down the passageway. Then she straightened up and began to lift the stones out of the bowl, one by one, arranging them in a gleaming circle on the table.

Circles were cycles and unlike lines, they never ended. A circle was a good shape and a reminder that things could be left in the past without being forgotten.

There was a metaphor there, too.


End file.
